Orthodox Jews banned from renting holiday homes by German travel firm

“More likely, the complaints are directed at large hareidi families with overly indulgent parents, a not unusual occurrence.”

Even then, the landlords should say “damage our property and expect a huge fine”.

As an ex-landlord I can understand not wanting tenants who damage your property and then stereotyping people because of one or two bad experience(s), but this is a company and they can’t ban everyone from a particular group

Jews in pre-WWI Germany weren't generally attacked. They assimilated with society.

I see the rise of 19th century anti-semitism (which was based more on race rather than religion was due to 2 factors:

1. the rise of the nation-state within a certain territory

This came after the French revolution and was the root cause of franconization, then anglicization, russification and germanization - wherein minorities like the Bretons, Welsh, Poles, Jews etc. were told to assimilate linguistically and otehrwise

2. Darwin's theories taken to absurd extremes - by creating the concept of "races" and applying "survival of the fittest" to these

That is good, and I would suggest also reading
1. the History of the Jews in the Roman Empire
2. History of the Jews in Cochin
3. Jews in the Sassanid empire.

It is interesting comparing the history of Jews in these 3 regions:
In Cochin state in southern India, the Jews were never numerous and were never persecuted.
But they assimilated culturally and linguistically with the locals.

In the Sassanid empire the Jews were numerous - especially in what is now Iraq with the area being up to 20% Jewish. The Persians promoted them as they were pro-Sassanid, but the locals didn’t like the Jews due to Jews not assimilating and also some Jewish practices of ritual separation

In the Roman empire - things first started off well with the Romans and the Maccabeeans actually being allies against the Seleucids (read the book of the Maccabees), but the first blow was Pompey entering the Holy of Holies to sight-see (and thereby desecrating the temple).

Things got bad for Jews in Israel due to the Jewish-Roman wars, but their actions in the Kitos war (when Jews massacred thousands of Gentiles in Cyrene and Cyprus) and they were considered odious throughout the Roman empire. This image remained until Julian the Apostate in the 330s who actively promoted Jews.

The state of Jews in the Byzantine empire deteriorated by the 620s,

In 620 during the Roman-Persian war when Persia conquered Egypt and Israel, they were actively supported by Jews (AND by Monophysite Copts).

The same two groups also later supported the Arab conquest of Jerusalem and Egypt (for the same reason, to stick it to the Romans) and Jews also aided the Arab conquerors of the Iberian peninsula.

that collaboration set up bad blood for the next few centuries.

It is this horrific negative re-inforcement that we need to stop.

The Germans of today should not be blamed for the sins of their grand fathers or they may just say “let’s embrace it”

"I am quite confident that my impoverished great grandfather, who was a respected tailor in his shtetl, knew nothing of those things. Maybe there was some other reason his family was repeatedly attacked. Maybe they were shape-shifters?"

I hail from the same ancestry. It is highly likely the Jewish tradesmen in the shtetl provided services mostly to their own people and had no or very little relationship with the world outside the sthetl (unless they practice a highly specialized trade, like a renowned jeweler.) The typical Jewish person the surrounding Gentiles had to regularly interact with, in the old days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, would have been: 1) The Jewish tavernkeeper 2) The arendator, who collected revenue for the Polish landlords who could not be bothered to run their own estates. 3) The moneychanger, (who was often the same person as #2) The Jews keeping apart and maintaining a separate identity/culture did not help. How can you make friends and influence people, when you cannot even sit down to share a meal (one of the most basic forms of fellowship)? On top of that, you had the peasants go to church on Sunday and their Orthodox priest tell them that these people, yes, these people, murdered your God. Fast forward to the 19-th century emergence of nationalism and national identities, and you have a recipe for genocidal violence.

I have traveled the world.
I, a Jew, would have gotten along very well with most any Wehrmacht soldier.
Not all - in fact hardly any - were evil.
But who stood up to the “Jews Forbidden” signs?
Who took down the flags?
Not all Americans are evil, either.
Not all Americans, for instance, “like” the rainbow flag.
But that flag flies over our Embassies, at the White House,
and almost all big American cities have a big Pride Week.
Most stay silent.
Good people, all!
But nobody tears down a flag.
It is a flawed analogy, certainly,
but, for all intents and purposes,
ours will be remembered as an LGBT country.
Our flag flies with the LGBT flag,
and Americans, to the world, are gay,
and we’ll be seen as gay as we fall.

Furthermore, and most impportantly, it is not a scholarly work.

It is a polemic and has nothing to do with unbiased historical research. The author’s other works, dealing with the Catholic church and “international justice” are similarly biased.

It is no coincidence that HWE was canned by all serious historians of the Shoah. Among those were Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, who called HWE “ahistorical”, Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, who called the book “racist”, as well as American historian Fritz Stern, who denounced the book as unscholarly and full of racist Germanophobia.

Famed British historian Ian Kershaw saw no scholarly merit in Goldhagen’s book, either, not to mention Germanophile - albeit controversial - historians like Paul Gottfried or Norman Finkelstein.

WHE was a polemic, nothing more. No wonder Dr. Goldhagen’s contract with Harvard University was not renewed after it expired in 1999.

Goldhagen continued to work as a house-husband afterwards (nothing wrong with that, imho), which shows that, obviously, no employer considered him a respectable historian anymore after the HWE debacle.

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